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KDrive, Xnest, Xvfb Called For Removal From X.Org

03-27-2012, 10:20 AM

Phoronix: KDrive, Xnest, Xvfb Called For Removal From X.Org

X.Org developers are currently discussing the possibility to remove the KDrive, Xnest, and Xvfb technologies from the X.Org Server, citing that their functionality has been superseded by better alternatives and this could lead to trimming the xorg-server by over 30,000 lines of code...

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Well, Xfbdev hasn't been usable in several releases (they broke both keyboard and mouse in 1.3, IIRC). While I personally use many of the would-be-kicked and already-kicked servers, it's quite understandable when the people who use them (mainly embedded folks, with little to none X dev experience) aren't the people who maintain X.

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From my experience using Xephyr and Xnest, most of them have little things broken everywhere.
If they are not maintained and are untested, it's better to remove them than to leave users frustrated with crashes and other problems.

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From my experience using Xephyr and Xnest, most of them have little things broken everywhere.
If they are not maintained and are untested, it's better to remove them than to leave users frustrated with crashes and other problems.

So it's better that users have no software than buggy software?

I've used Xnest, Xvfb and Xephyr for various things in the past, and would hate to see them go.

At the least, I really think they should wait 'till all the functionality of these servers which aren't currently available in the DDX drivers are implemented first before removing the servers, it'd provide motivation for whoever wants the servers removed to actually get the work done, whereas if the servers are removed first then we will likely never see some of the functionality re-implemented, and will effectively be removing functionality for no good reason.

And before someone mentions "removing 30,000 lines of code" as a good enough reason, I wonder how much of that code actually affects the Xorg server itself?
Pretty sure they're all separate code trees within the source tarballs...

Anyways, from reading through the mailing list messages looks like it's gonna happen regardless of what I or other end users think.

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I imagine it will be better to just keep the support for X by I/O Kit on macosx, preferably only for the latest version. It should seriously reduce the number of lines.
"
- Please, can someone can explains me where is Xnest ?
- I don't know I don't work on deprecated code, you can use an older version. You can search the git repository yourself, compile the code, reimplement it... do whatever you want, it's free software.
- Thanks.
"